Clearly, you can use these types of pestos well beyond soups, but it’s likely you never considered adding a pesto to a soup for extra flavor. Most soups are seasoned with a lot of salt. If you’ve ever looked at the nutritional label of a canned soup, you’ll notice how high the sodium level is. Some of that is due to the extra preservatives needed to make that soup hold up long enough to pass onto your grandchildren, but a lot of it is just salt.

Even a basic hand-chopped pesto (this one uses just two basic ingredients – sun-dried tomatoes and parsley) can make a huge difference in flavor and is a lot more colorful and fun than adding salt to your homemade soup.

I love a good minestrone soup, especially when I already have a little bit of leftover cooked pasta on hand, but feel free to get creative and use this pesto topping on all types of soups.

Let us know your favorite soup in the comments below, so we can think of some fun way to jazz it up!

Prepping Smarts:

You can definitely use a blender or a food processor to make a pesto, but hand chopping is a great way to improve your knife skills. See how in our video below:

Click here for more ideas on different hand-chopped pesto combinations.

Many soups start with onions and carrots. Make sure you know how to chop them quickly and efficiently using our videos below:

Equipment Smarts:

A Dutch oven is great for making soups because it retains heat so well.